Ask HN: What types of companies and industries tend to hire recent (CS) grads? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What types of companies and industries tend to hire recent (CS) grads?

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It's no secret that companies are cautious when hiring software engineers - the usual wisdom being that a bad hire can cause a lot of harm. Being a recent grad exacerbates this problem, being unproven relative to most other candidates.

That being said, I've noticed that there seems to be classes of people & companies who are a bit more apt to take that kind of risk. It's hard to pin them down though. In your experience, what are these classes? What drives companies to consider recent grads?

Or am I wrong - finding patterns in the noise - and that's basically unknowable?

Most job listings don't mention if they aren't considering new grads (even if the listing doesn't exclude them). For that reason, I'm trying to figure out which companies (and even which industries) are more likely to hire recent grads in order to better target my job search. Hopefully this info can help others in my position as well.

Thanks for looking.

The larger and older the company, the lower the risk for every employee. Every employee adds to (new productivity)/(new risk + existing stability), that small amount turns out to be a lot when you go from one to two employees but not a lot when you go from 100 to 101 employees.

I've been very impressed with the way that Microsoft, Dell, Intel are willing to take the time to onboard new employees. (Although some prefer interning them first)

You can also look into research / government support. Government organizations or government contractors are usually not as competitive financially, although more competitive on most other dimensions. "No one gets rich at JPL" was a phrase often joked about by people that had spent 20+ years in that sort of work. Many of the younger people at GrammaTech & Galois were hired right out of college. They're stability comes from a different business model.

No one hires new grads out of the goodness of their own heart. This is a tactical decision to drive value to the business. I've seen this manifest in two classes of company:

1. Underfunded companies who hire the young and ambitious because they're cheaper. This may be a tiny startup where you'll have an opportunity to learn a lot from the school of hard knocks, work crazy hours, and then vow to never do that again. Or this could be an older non-tech company that doesn't really value engineers and you'll stagnate.

2. Larger mature companies who can't hire enough Seniors. Big Tech needs a steady stream of new blood as their most talented engineers slowly leave to pursue other exciting opportunities. They are simply incapable of hiring replacements at the necessary scale, so instead they build a pipeline of new developers in the hopes that some percentage of them will level up in their skills and stick around for a while. With appropriate mentorship, it's sometime easier to grow a new Senior than to hire one.

For what it's worth I've never heard of a company or industry that actively avoids new grads. If anything, many companies seem to prefer new grads because they're cheap, don't have families taking up their time, and can usually pick up whatever technology they need to on the job.

The hard part is developing skills later in your career that a new grad can't just pick up, so that you continue to be worth your salary.

That said, sub-industries do vary in terms of how easy their work is to just "pick up" for anyone with a generic CS background, versus ones that require more experience. Some rough categories in rough order:

Basic CRUD apps (most startups, mobile, web)

Enterprise

Systems

Embedded

A lot of places I've worked tend to avoid new grads as there hasn't really been capacity to train them in such a way that wouldn't mean a loss of productivity for the team for a month or two.

edit: these places have been small/medium sized private companies

I don't feel there's more risk with grads. Because they typically don't work on the riskiest projects anyway from the start anyway.

Typically, companies that are more or less stable in their hiring needs, tend to be more open for grads, as they are more sure it will pay off in the long run.

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